strange and random happenstance

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
Published by: Katherine Tegen Books
Publication Date: January 16th, 2018
Format: Kindle, 432 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Ellingham Academy is known to an elite few in academia for it's unique approach to learning while it is known to everyone who is a true crime aficionado for Truly Devious. Albert Ellingham was rich, eccentric, and a true original. So what do rich, eccentric men do? They carve out the side of a mountain in Vermont and open a school to encourage unique thinking and a love of the game with their home being the crown jewel of the campus that holds parties worthy of Jay Gatsby. But rich men have enemies and Ellingham Academy became the scene of one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the twentieth century. On April 13th, 1936, Albert's wife Iris and daughter Alice went for a drive and never returned. There was a phone call, a ransom demand, it was paid, a young student, Dottie Epstein, went missing, another phone call, more ransom demanded, it was paid again, Dottie and Iris's bodies were found, a local man became the scapegoat for the murders but all believed he was innocent, Alice was never seen again. And then there was the letter signed "Truly, Devious." In 1938 Albert Ellingham died in a tragic boating accident with his confidant George Marsh. The Truly Devious case has never been solved. Surprisingly, in all the years since the tragedy, Ellingham Academy is still flourishing, not letting the past blight the present. They still look for the best and the brightest to offer a unique and tailored two year education. Stevie Bell is part of the incoming class. Who would have thought that Stevie, a 16-year-old from Pittsburgh raised by right wing conservatives who isn't the most stellar of students would be at Ellingham academy rubbing elbows and sharing digs with authors and internet famous actors and solving the Truly Devious case? Because that is why she is there, that is why she was accepted, she said she was going to solve Truly Devious. And Stevie must be doing something right because the more she investigates the more odd things happen, and soon tragedy will strike Ellingham Academy again. Can Stevie solve a cold case when a current case is threatening her safety and sanity? And will she ever see a moose?

Truly Devious has a split personality disorder. The historic crime is witty and literary and has allusions to Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Lindbergh kidnapping, while the modern half is oozing YA angst the likes of which I haven't seen since I read the dreck that Cassandra Clare calls "writing." And OMG I just looked up Maureen Johnson and she wrote for The Bane Chronicles and Ghosts of the Shadow Market and Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy and is friends with Cassandra Clare! Life actually makes sense! I wasn't just losing my mind. Well, I'm probably still losing my mind but not in regards to this. The problem of this split in the narrative is that I wasn't yet invested in Stevie and her angst and her feelings for David and her panic disorder and instead was just waiting for the story to take me back to the thirties. I wanted to be in that glittering world. I wanted to immerse myself in the Truly Devious crime. I wanted to solve it along with Stevie, only I wanted to do it without really learning anything about her. Which isn't really fair to Stevie, but that's just how it is. But then again, Maureen Johnson doesn't really play fair either. The main complaint I've seen with regard to this book is that the mystery isn't solved. Not the historic or the present day crime are in any way concluded. We are just left with more questions than answers. Which, at the time, only slightly irked me. I had gotten the book from the library and as soon as I finished it I was able to buy the boxed set and was able to continue reading the trilogy so as to solve the crime. But when I told a friend of mine how much I loved the series, which he eventually agreed with, he pointed out the lack of resolution in the first book and how this just wasn't done. And the more I thought about it the more I agreed. I didn't expect the historical mystery to be resolved but the modern mystery needed to be at the very least. I was able to binge these books one right after the other, but imagine having to wait a year between each installment? That could lead to some very disgruntled readers. Thankfully as you read this review, know that you can, over the course of three books, learn whodunit.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Albert Ellingham, Cassandra Clare, Charles Lindbergh, Dorothy Parker, Ellingham Academy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maureen Johson, Stevie Bell, Summer School, True Crime, Truly Devious, Unsolved Mysteries, Vermont

Rarely do you come across an adaptation that is perfection, which is probably why Netflix abruptly cancelled it. They couldn't see genius right in front of them that they commissioned and instead just made more Bridgerton. Not that I have anything against Bridgerton as a cultural phenomena, I have very highly specific issues which if I was to livestream would be me yelling about the music and sticking closer to the books. I love those books. But this review isn't about Bridgerton. Seriously it isn't. OK it is a little because Ruby Stokes quit playing Francesca on Bridgerton to play Lucy on Lockwood and Co.. But I swear that's the end of it. This is about the genius of Joe Cornish's adaptation of Jonathan Stroud's books. He literally brought the books to life. I know that's a cliched, hackneyed phrase, but do you really realize how rare of an occurrence this is? There are millions of adaptations out there, and many that I like, and a few that I love, but rarely does it happen where the book and the adaptation feel so aligned that the changes made don't annoy me. You could go in the opposite direction and pull a William Goldman, but I honestly think that William Goldman and both of his versions of The Princess Bride are a once in a lifetime event. And to have someone who isn't Andrew Davies pull it off? Well, tip of the hat to you Mr. Cornish. Though I shouldn't have been surprised once I realized so much of the production team were friends and colleagues of Edgar Wright and they did nail his flare for the perfect song at the perfect moment. From the second the opening credits rolled I knew this show was for me. Not only did it give background on The Problem with amazing infographics that I would have killed to have been talented enough to design, but the music has this Unsolved Mysteries meets The X-Files vibe that made me not only not "skip intro" but occasionally I'd watch them more than once. But this isn't a case where a bad show has amazing credits, looking at you final few seasons of Mad Men, the quality of the credits carried through to the show. The casting was perfect, the set, while it wasn't how I had pictured 35 Portland Row it was still 35 Portland Row. And as for how they were able to maintain Lucy's voice through her tape recorder taking the place of her first person narration, genius. I mean, if you want to quibble, some of my friends think that the show could have done a better setup with describing the different levels of ghosts, but seeing as I've read the books I don't think I'm able to speak to that because I've read the accompanying glossary in every volume so these facts are ingrained in me now. I'll say that I wish George had been more body positive, but at least with casting Ali Hadji-Heshmati they were able to still show inclusivity. Also Lucy tends to drop her sword a bit too much. And the pacing was a little too breakneck... But as you can see these are literally nitpicking. Because while Louise Brealey skeeved me out, she was meant to! I just am bereft that there is going to be no more of this show. I mean, it's not as bad as say the fate of Willow, I still have the books so I know how the story ends, but this, THIS was something special. This was it for me.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: And the Emmy Goes To, Bridgerton, Edgar Wright, Francesca Bridgerton, Joe Cornish, Jonathan Stroud, Lockwood & Co., Lucy Carlyle, Ruby Stokes, The Princess Bride, The Problem, The X-Files, Unsolved Mysteries

Dangerous to Know by Tasha Alexander
Published by: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: October 26th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 306 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Emily is still reeling from her miscarriage in Constantinople. A happy honeymoon filled with intrigue and connubial bliss destroyed by one bullet. She must take solace in the fact that she saved a young girl's life and caught a killer and not dwell on the fact that she and Colin might never be able to have children now. Ensconced in Normandy, Emily's recuperation would be far more successful if it wasn't under the gimlet eye of her mother-in-law. The feeling of being a constant disappointment to Colin and his mother pushes Emily continually outside the four walls of the house that feel like they're closing in on her. But soon even the countryside won't offer her respite. On one of her rides she comes upon a young girl brutally murdered. So brutal that when she is finally able to lead the police back to the crime scene there are murmurs that Jack the Ripper might be calling Normandy his new home. Emily gets a little bit of celebrity with the locals for finding the body, but Colin worries if perhaps it's best if Emily's attention was drawn elsewhere. She doesn't need to investigate the most dangerous of crimes and be continually putting herself in danger.

Colin is therefore a little relieved when his mother's neighbors, George and Madeline Markham, have a diversion for Emily to occupy herself with. They are great art collectors and a new Monet painting has just appeared in their fortress like home. Emily's dear friend Cecile, arriving from Paris, recognizes the piece as one just finished and stolen from Giverny. Emily correctly comes to the conclusion that her favorite thief, Sebastian Capet, has returned to spice up her life with Greek quotations left on her pillow each night. But even Sebastian, with his laissez-faire attitude, can not deny that danger lurks near at hand for Emily. The murdered girl looked eerily like Emily and once it's discovered she wasn't the Rippers typical victim, being from a well-to-do family who had placed her in an asylum, Colin is all for Emily heading straight back to England and waiting for him there. Yet Emily can not do that. Yes, she wants to obey Colin, but never before has that meant leaving his side. But could retreating be in her best interest? She just doesn't know! She can no longer trust her mental faculties after she sees the ghostly apparition of a young child. Is this her grief over her own loss or is she on the path to the asylum like the Ripper's victim?

At the end of each adventure with Lady Emily I think to myself, the next volume couldn't possibly be better, and yet each and every time Tasha proves me wrong. This volume instantly became my favorite, but who knows what will happen when I read the next book? But I don't know how it could surpass the Gothic goodness of Dangerous to Know! This book almost felt like I was reading one of Emily's favorite authors! But could Mary Elizabeth Braddon come up with such a tale that Jack the Ripper, the Norman Heathcliff, and the ghostly apparition of a child people the pages!?! If she did I'm sure she wouldn't be able to capture the meta humor that Emily arches her eyebrows at with her love/hate relationship with Normandy's version of Wuthering Heights. But what called to me most was the Jack the Ripper angle. Long before the term Murderino came into existence I was one. I would watch all the Unsolved Mysteries I could, especially if they were historical. Therefore it shouldn't be surprising that I'm a bit of a Ripperologist. I have watched or read every movie, book, comic, TV series I can on Jack the Ripper. Therefore this inclusion in Emily's investigation made by blood sing! Oh, to combine my favorite heroine with what I find the most intriguing unsolved murders of the 1800s? How did Tasha know that this would be my wish for a perfect book!?!

Though I think the inclusion of Jack the Ripper in a story wherein Emily is dealing with the loss of her child would be significant only to a Ripperologist. What could I mean you ask? Well, let me break it down. Let's look to the canonical five. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols suffered abdominal incisions, which were seen again in the second victim Annie Chapman. But all this was leading up to what would be done to the fifth and final victim, Mary Jane Kelly. All her internal organs from her abdomen, in particular her reproductive organs, were removed, and her breasts were cut off. While there are theories, much like with the Black Dahlia, that these wounds could have been used to cover up a botched abortion, one thing is clear, Jack the Ripper was targeting women who made their money from sex and then killed them in such a way as to destroy what made them female, the ability to reproduce, only fully succeeding with Mary Jane Kelly. And as for the theories of Mary Jane Kelly's daughter... well, all this shows that by including Jack the Ripper in Dangerous to Know Tasha was adding another level of gut punch to Emily. Not only would she be traumatized by finding the poor girl in the field mutilated to such a degree, but to then have the reminder that her miscarriage basically scooped out her insides and made them as empty as Mary Jane Kelly's... chilling.

Tasha then compounds this loss with the ghostly child who leaves behind blue ribbons. So many ghost stories of the Victorian era or written about the Victorian era deal with children and mothers who have lost their children. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, which Emily was sure to have read, Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, a more modern classic, and even a book that Tasha recommended to me, Angelica by Arthur Phillips, these are three books just off the top of my head that I thought of while reading Dangerous to Know. I am sure there are plethora more, even Henry James's The Turn of the Screw for example. But what Tasha does is she is smart enough to create her own mythology, first the story of the young girl who fell off a cliff, then the local gossip surrounding a young child that was killed at George and Madeline Markham's house that Madeline has conflated with her own pregnancy losses. Then there's the poor victim and what she endured... but where Tasha excels is that she draws a parallel between these stories and the loss endured by Victorian women. I believe it is Cecile who comments that she doesn't think she can think of a single one of their friends who hasn't suffered a similar loss to Emily's. Childbirth and childhood were dangerous undertakings during this time and the ghost stories are almost a way to normalize the fear these women constantly felt, even if it has the effect of unsettling them at the time.

For all that I loved there's one thing that made me go WTF!?! And that was Colin's behavior. Emily married Colin because he accepted who she was and wanted to be by his side, investigating and solving crimes, and now he's trying to wrap her up in cotton wool and let nothing bad ever happen to her again. YOU KNEW WHO SHE WAS WHEN YOU MARRIED HER YOU DUMBASS! She wouldn't have married him if she knew he was going to pull a 180 and decide to become the typical Victorian husband. She had that once and while at the time what Philip offered was what she thought she wanted, she has grown since then and become this awesome hoyden. Sure, she was badly injured and their unborn child was lost, but Dear God Colin, she doesn't need you pulling this shit when she's trying to piece her life back together. And yes, I know this is a plot device, one to destabilize Emily even more as well as show what marriages were really like during the Victorian era, but that doesn't mean it stopped my blood from boiling. Though it does actually all tie back into the killer, whose motives I did not see coming, and the idea of what we are willing to do for love. Would we break the will of our loved one if we think it's in their best interest? Would we imprison them for their safety? Would we kill for them?

Yet one thing is certain, I don't think Colin's mother would approve of his coddling of Emily. Madame Hargreaves is who I think Emily will evolve into. Yes, it's trite to say that boys marry women who remind them of their mothers, but going beyond that, Colin believes in the rights and equality of women, so it would make sense that he would find a woman he viewed as his equal to marry. At first I, like Emily, was wary of her mother-in-law, but I grew to really appreciate her, so much so that she better be returning in a later book! I love the little insights into the mind of Mrs. Hargreaves with her journal entries, a device Tasha has used from the first book in this series starting with Philip's journal and later being letters from Emily's various friends, that give us insight that Emily herself doesn't have that acts as a catalyst to the plot. What tickles me is that Mrs. Hargreaves is so hard on Emily, she just doesn't see what Colin does. But we, as readers, see that all her criticisms are because Emily has turned inward and is recovering and that the "real" Emily would perfectly match her mother-in-laws' expectations. By the end of the book they have come to an understanding, but I can't wait to meet them again now that they are on equal footing. The government of England better send out a warning, because these women want the right to vote! Long live strong women!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Angelica, Dangerous to Know, France, Going Gothic, Gothic, Heathcliff, Jack the Ripper, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Pregnancy, Tasha Alexander, The Woman in White, Unsolved Mysteries, Victorian, Wuthering Heights

Dangerous to Know by Tasha Alexander
Published by: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: October 26th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 306 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Emily is still reeling from her miscarriage in Constantinople. A happy honeymoon filled with intrigue and connubial bliss destroyed by one bullet. She must take solace in the fact that she saved a young girl's life and caught a killer and not dwell on the fact that she and Colin might never be able to have children now. Ensconced in Normandy, Emily's recuperation would be far more successful if it wasn't under the gimlet eye of her mother-in-law. The feeling of being a constant disappointment to Colin and his mother pushes Emily continually outside the four walls of the house that feel like they're closing in on her. But soon even the countryside won't offer her respite. On one of her rides she comes upon a young girl brutally murdered. So brutal that when she is finally able to lead the police back to the crime scene there are murmurs that Jack the Ripper might be calling Normandy his new home. Emily gets a little bit of celebrity with the locals for finding the body, but Colin worries if perhaps it's best if Emily's attention was drawn elsewhere. She doesn't need to investigate the most dangerous of crimes and be continually putting herself in danger.

Colin is therefore a little relieved when his mother's neighbors, George and Madeline Markham, have a diversion for Emily to occupy herself with. They are great art collectors and a new Monet painting has just appeared in their fortress like house. Emily's dear friend Cecile, arriving from Paris, recognizes the piece as one just finished and stolen from Giverny. Emily correctly comes to the conclusion that her favorite thief, Sebastian Capet, has returned to spice up her life with Greek quotations left on her pillow each night. But even Sebastian, with his laissez-faire attitude, can not deny that danger lurks near at hand for Emily. The murdered girl looked eerily like Emily and once it's discovered she wasn't the Rippers typical victim, being from a well-to-do family who had placed her in an asylum, Colin is all for Emily heading straight back to England and waiting for him there. Yet Emily can not do that. Yes, she wants to obey Colin, but never before has that meant leaving his side. But could retreating be in her best interest? She just doesn't know! She can no longer trust her mental faculties after she sees the ghostly apparition of a young child. Is this her grief over her own loss or is she on the path to the asylum like the Ripper's victim?

At the end of each adventure with Lady Emily I think to myself, the next volume couldn't possibly be better, and yet each and every time Tasha proves me wrong. This volume instantly became my favorite, but who knows what will happen when I read the next book? But I don't know how it could surpass the Gothic goodness of Dangerous to Know! This book almost felt like I was reading one of Emily's favorite authors! But could Mary Elizabeth Braddon come up with such a tale that Jack the Ripper, the Norman Heathcliff, and the ghostly apparition of a child people the pages!?! If she did I'm sure she wouldn't be able to capture the meta humor that Emily arches her eyebrows at with her love/hate relationship with Normandy's version of Wuthering Heights. But what called to me most was the Jack the Ripper angle. Long before the term Murderino came into existence I was one. I would watch all the Unsolved Mysteries I could, especially if they were historical. Therefore it shouldn't be surprising that I'm a bit of a Ripperologist. I have watched or read every movie, book, comic, TV series I can on Jack the Ripper. Therefore this inclusion in Emily's investigation made by blood sing! Oh, to combine my favorite heroine with what I find the most intriguing unsolved murders of the 1800s? How did Tasha know that this would be my wish for a perfect book!?!

Though I think the inclusion of Jack the Ripper in a story wherein Emily is dealing with the loss of her child would be significant only to a Ripperologist. What could I mean you ask? Well, let me break it down. Let's look to the canonical five. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols suffered abdominal incisions, which were seen again in the second victim Annie Chapman. But all this was leading up to what would be done to the fifth and final victim, Mary Jane Kelly. All her internal organs from her abdomen, in particular her reproductive organs, were removed, and her breasts were cut off. While there are theories, much like with the Black Dahlia, that these wounds could have been used to cover up a botched abortion, one thing is clear, Jack the Ripper was targeting women who made their money from sex and then killed them in such a way as to destroy what made them female, the ability to reproduce, only fully succeeding with Mary Jane Kelly. And as for the theories of Mary Jane Kelly's daughter... well, all this shows that by including Jack the Ripper in Dangerous to Know Tasha was adding another level of gut punch to Emily. Not only would she be traumatized by finding the poor girl in the field mutilated to such a degree, but to then have the reminder that her miscarriage basically scooped out her insides and made them as empty as Mary Jane Kelly's... chilling.

Tasha then compounds this loss with the ghostly child who leaves behind blue ribbons. So many ghost stories of the Victorian era or written about the Victorian era deal with children and mothers who have lost their children. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, which Emily was sure to have read, Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, a more modern classic, and even a book that Tasha recommended to me, Angelica by Arthur Phillips, these are three books just off the top of my head that I thought of while reading Dangerous to Know. I am sure there are a plethora more, even Henry James's The Turn of the Screw for example. But what Tasha does is she is smart enough to create her own mythology, first the story of the young girl who fell off a cliff, then the local gossip surrounding a young child that was killed at George and Madeline Markham's house that Madeline has conflated with her own pregnancy losses. Then there's the poor victim and what she endured... but where Tasha excels is that she draws a parallel between these stories and the loss endured by Victorian women. I believe it is Cecile who comments that she doesn't think she can think of a single one of their friends who hasn't suffered a similar loss to Emily's. Childbirth and childhood were dangerous undertakings during this time and the ghost stories are almost a way to normalize the fear these women constantly felt, even if it has the effect of unsettling them at the time.

For all that I loved there's one thing that made me go WTF!?! And that was Colin's behavior. Emily married Colin because he accepted who she was and wanted to be by his side, investigating and solving crimes, and now he's trying to wrap her up in cotton wool and let nothing bad ever happen to her again. YOU KNEW WHO SHE WAS WHEN YOU MARRIED HER YOU DUMBASS! She wouldn't have married him if she knew he was going to pull a 180 and decide to become the typical Victorian husband. She had that once and while at the time what Philip offered was what she thought she wanted, she has grown since then and become this awesome hoyden. Sure, she was badly injured and their unborn child was lost, but Dear God Colin, she doesn't need you pulling this shit when she's trying to piece her life back together. And yes, I know this is a plot device, one to destabilize Emily even more as well as show what marriages were really like during the Victorian era, but that doesn't mean it stopped my blood from boiling. Though it does actually all tie back into the killer, whose motives I did not see coming, and the idea of what we are willing to do for love. Would we break the will of our loved one if we think it's in their best interest? Would we imprison them for their safety? Would we kill for them?

Yet one thing is certain, I don't think Colin's mother would approve of his coddling of Emily. Madame Hargreaves is who I think Emily will evolve into. Yes, it's trite to say that boys marry women who remind them of their mothers, but going beyond that, Colin believes in the rights and equality of women, so it would make sense that he would find a woman he viewed as his equal to marry. At first I, like Emily, was wary of her mother-in-law, but I grew to really appreciate her, so much so that she better be returning in a later book! I love the little insights into the mind of Mrs. Hargreaves with her journal entries, a device Tasha has used from the first book in this series starting with Philip's journal and later being letters from her various friends, that give us insight that Emily herself doesn't have that acts as a catalyst to the plot. What tickles me is that Mrs. Hargreaves is so hard on Emily, she just doesn't see what Colin does. But we, as readers, see that all her criticisms are because Emily has turned inward and is recovering and that the "real" Emily would perfectly match her mother-in-laws' expectations. By the end of the book they have come to an understanding, but I can't wait to meet them again now that they are on equal footing. The government of England better send out a warning, because these women want the right to vote! Long live strong women!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alexander Autumn, Angelica, Dangerous to Know, France, Gothic, Heathcliff, Jack the Ripper, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Pregnancy, Tasha Alexander, The Woman in White, Unsolved Mysteries, Victorian, Wuthering Heights

Lovers' Lane: The Hall-Mills Mystery by Rick Geary
Published by: NBM Publishing
Publication Date: July 17th, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 80 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

On September 14th, 1922, shots rang out near an old abandoned farm used by the New Brunswick locals as lovers' lane. No one went to investigate and it wasn't until two days later that the bodies of Edward Hall, an Episcopal priest, and Eleanor Mills, a member of the church choir, were found. They were staged side-by-side with their feet facing a crab apple tree. A hat obscured Edward Hall's face so only his calling card propped against his shoe gave a hint as to who the male victim was at first. While both victims were shot, the female multiple times, besides having her hand placed on Edward Hall's thigh her throat was also slit from ear to ear, it was later discovered that her tongue and surrounding organs had been removed as well. Around them their love letters were scattered, an apparent judgment from the killer on this adulterous couple. Edward Hall was a pillar of the community and a favorite with his lady parishioners, though he ended up marrying spinster Frances Noel Stevens, an older woman who happened to be an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune and lived with a mentally handicapped brother. Yet most of the community knew of his affair with the talented chorister, who herself was trapped in a loveless marriage. The case soon became a media circus, yet almost everything was badly handled, like Edward Hall's calling card which was handed through the gathering crowd for scrutiny. The crab apple tree was even denuded of branches by souvenir hunters. But the crime baffled the police, who didn't even know who should investigate, the bodies being found in the next county from where the victims lived. But again and again the investigation lead back to Mrs. Hall. Could she, with the help of her wealthy family, have killed her husband just as he was ready to elope with his mistress? For now, the case remains unsolved.

It's a wonderful thing to discover a new author and realize you have their entire back catalog to work through. I was lucky enough to stumble onto Rick Geary one dreary day at the library. I wasn't feeling the best and I wasn't at my local branch, but they had such a lovely display in their graphic novel section featuring several books I'd been wanting to read, from Alison Bechdel to the history of the Carter Family. And there, in between Fun Home and The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song was Adventures of Blanche by Rick Geary. Needless to say I actually took the whole display home with me. Geary's style seemed vaguely familiar but I was soon lost to the narrative, Geary had taken his grandmother's old letters as a starting off point and then lovingly embellished them to be more dramatic and more of their time, with murderers running rampant and famous painters walking in and out of frame. I quickly finished this slender volume and went to look up Geary online. Having worked for both National Lampoon and MAD during my childhood back when I devoured those tomes it's no wonder his style was familiar to me with his people that all look like they have cat whiskers for jawbone definition. He was a part of my past and very soon he was to become a part of my present when I realized that he had written oodles of true crime graphic novels! Nine of which I devoured last year and I can't wait to finish the remaining few.

Here's the thing about me. I LOVE true crime. I went through a period where all I watched was police procedural shows from Homicide: Life on the Street to all the iterations of Law and Order and I especially worshiped Unsolved Mysteries. Because I realized I don't really like true crime that happens now, I like true crime that happened then. I am not joking when I say that if I had a time machine I'd just go back and see who all the famous killers and kidnappers were. Who was Jack the Ripper? What really happened to James Ellroy's mother that turned him into the writer he is today? I don't just want, I NEED to know! When I was in undergrad I saw a very interesting one man play about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby. With all the new speculation about what really happened and Lindbergh's Nazi leanings I decided that the first book I'd check out in Geary's Treasury of XXth Century Murder would be The Lindbergh Child. I couldn't have been happier. This book, this series, combined two things I love, true crime and art. While many people might take issue with how simple his drawing style is, nothing more than line work, there is a place for ALL kinds of graphic novels in the world and this style suits the pared down, spare, clean way he lays out the crime and methodically analyzes it. Maps and cross sections of buildings make Geary the David Maccaulay of True Crime! In each of Geary's books I've read he has told and shown the crime more succinctly than any other author I've ever read. He has a gift for distillation and visualization that is remarkable.

But all this could apply to any one of his books I picked up from The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Mass., 1892 to The Murder of Abraham Lincoln. Here I want to talk about his handling of the Hall-Mills double murder that happened in the fall of 1922. This book just struck me so forcibly I can't quite understand why. It's almost as if I have a weird connection to the crime. It felt familiar somehow and yet, I'm sure I'd never heard of this crime before. While it lead to a media circus what I was drawn to was the more personal nature of this story. So many of the great unsolved crimes are serial killers who were never caught, yet here it's just an adulterous couple at the center of the media firestorm. Plus, the way the crime was committed, the removal of the organs that allowed Eleanor Mills to sing, plus having her favorite song removed from every copy of every hymnal in the church, I agree with the victim's daughter, it sounds like a crime committed by a woman. In fact, that's one thing I really like about this series by Geary, he shows that despite public opinion, women are just as capable of committing really heinous crimes. While this case was never solved, and was very much muddied by an attention seeker known as "the pig lady," Edward Hall's wealthy wife and family were tried and found not guilty. And yet the tale does have a sense of closure. Because a woman had to have committed the crime, and whether it was Frances Noel Stevens or another female parishioner whose advances were spurned by the priest, you have a handle on the probability of who the culprit was. Yes, Frances could have used her money to walk away from a crime she committed, she did act very oddly over the days following her husband's disappearance. But unlike Jack the Ripper, you can clearly see the motive if not the culprit.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adultery, Adventures of Blanche, Charles Lindbergh, Comics, Homicide, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Lovers' Lane, Murder, Rick Geary, The Hall-Mills Mystery, Treasury of XXth Century Murder, Unsolved Mysteries